Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of the Economist
Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Zanny Minton Beddoes’ office may have a worn and old-fashioned feel, indeed it wouldn’t be surprising if it turned out it hasn’t had a makeover since the Economist’s arrival in 1964, but she couldn’t be more focused on the shiny digital future.

“We don’t want to be the grandpa at the disco,” says Minton Beddoes, the first female editor in the business magazine’s 173-year history. “The bedrock of this place is the weekly Economist but in the 21st century that is no longer enough.”

Building the Economist brand on social media, bearing in mind that nearly all content is behind a paywall, has been a major preoccupation since Beddoes took the reins last February. When she arrived there was just a single social media staffer, now there are nine; seven in the UK and one each in North America and Asia.

“It became clear to us that we needed to have a real social media push,” she says, citing more than 36 million social media “followers”, from Twitter and Facebook likes, to LinkedIn and Google+ circle members. “Much of that has happened in the last year. It’s a gift horse really,” she enthuses. “It is a way of telling people what you are doing, drawing in new subscribers. We have to be ourselves in social media. What does it mean to be the Economist on social media? I think a lot of what is characteristic of the Economist, its brevity and analysis, works very well actually. A very small number of articles, including the cover leader, are in front of the paywall [but] we tweet a huge number of articles.”

There has also been a bolstering of multimedia staff and output which includes Economist Radio, under Anne McElvoy, Economist TV and newly-minted Economist Film, which will produce 22 short documentary films this year, with titles including Drone Rangers and Drugs: War or Store?. “We are trying things editorially,” she says. “We’re not turning into a video company but I’m a real believer that we need to try new stuff and measure how it works.”

The conversation seems incongruous given Minton Beddoes’ spartan, dated office which includes an ancient screen, impossible to identify as either a computer or TV, on a window ledge gathering dust. Perhaps it was her predecessor John Micklethwait’s, now at Bloomberg News, who also left behind a framed note from the 33 miners trapped for 69 days underground in Chile. “It’s one of those buildings where the sartorial quality decreases the higher up you go,” she quips, referring to the mix of corporations that occupy the floors below. “It’s hedge fund, hedge fund, hedge fund, Fiat Chrysler [then] wonderfully scruffy journalists.”

She can look forward to an upgrade as the Economist is hunting for a new home after selling its London editorial office in St James’s for around £130m in February (the commercial operation is in Canary Wharf).

“We’ll stay in central London. We won’t go anywhere that editorial doesn’t want to go,” she says, adding that the building’s 200 staff are “completely squashed”. “We need a new kind of space. This building is fantastic but it is not the perfect building for being a 21st-century media organisation.”

The decision to move formed part of the deal in which Pearson offloaded its 50% stake in the Economist Group to existing shareholders for £469m in cash last August. That change of ownership meant Exor, the investment company led by John Elkann, heir to the Fiat business a few floors below Minton Beddoes’ office, become the biggest shareholder with a 43.4% stake. The deal included a 20% voting cap for any individual shareholder to safeguard the independence of the company.

The biggest change in ownership in 58 years came months after she became editor, and only a year after her return to the UK, first as business affairs editor, after two decades in the US. “For me it was quite a time,” she says. “It has turned out extraordinarily well. For a long time [Pearson selling] had been a big question … but it wasn’t anything that I anticipated. It was not expected, at least by me.”

She adds that the Elkann family empire, which has interests including Juventus football club and the publishers of Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily newspaper, and Turin daily La Stampa, is a benign and committed shareholder. “[They] are engaged but totally respectful of editorial independence,” she says of Exor. “They are very committed to media and the future of premium media. There are not that many global media brands of quality. We are smaller than many but we are a pretty powerful global media brand.”

The 48-year old, who early in her career worked as an IMF economist alongside Jeffrey Sachs before joining the magazine in 1994, has also taken an “evolution not revolution” approach to updating the Economist’s editorial.

This has included introducing more “big ideas” reporting, such as its exploration of assisted suicide and the right to die. About half the covers in the last year have been “non-news”. “It’s the ‘viewspaper’ idea,” she says. “I’m deeply liberal. I’m passionate about pushing that agenda. Social liberalism ... as well as economic and financial liberalism.”

The most popular edition in years was the Economist’s anti-Brexit edition, which she says was a newsstand sell-out. “We came out very early and clearly with where we stood on Brexit. By a long shot it was our best-performing cover. It wasn’t a sell-out because of our position. It was a sell-out because people really want a detailed, fact-based analysis. And that is what it was.”

Despite this success, as at other publishers print sales at the Economist have fallen across the globe, although the circulation still stands at 1.25m copies a week. Digital edition sales have broken through the 300,000 mark, up by 50% or more year-on-year in most markets, including the UK but not North and South America. Minton Beddoes says the print decline is in part to do with a “drive to quality” - getting rid of bulk copies and converting readers to paid subscribers.

“The overall circulation is slightly down but the profitability of our circulation is rising and print is still holding up remarkably well,” she says. “I’m completely agnostic [about whether] people read print or digital, I really want them to have a premium subscription giving them access to both.” The Economist is still willing to embrace the potential of print, as is shown by it launching 1843, a bi-monthly magazine (which replaced Intelligent Life) aimed at the “globally curious” which aims to speak to them “when they have their feet up, on a weekend break, on holiday”.

Minton Beddoes says the Economist is not feeling the same extreme pressure as advertising-reliant newspaper publishers. “I’m very simple about this. You make money out of things people pay for,” she says. “Subscriptions is the bulk of our business, ads are nice to have on top of that. We are in the midst of a massively changing disrupted industry and that is incredibly exciting but it is also challenging. There are going to be winners in that and losers. It is foolish for anyone to be complacent. I am confident and hopeful and paranoid at the same time.”

So, nearly 18 months in, how does she feel about breaking the glass ceiling of being the first female editor of the Economist? “Lots of people ask me about how I feel about being the first woman editor,” she says. “The answer is that I’m thrilled to be doing this job and my main priority is to do it as well as I can. I can’t wait for the day when it is no longer newsworthy that a woman is appointed editor of a newspaper.”